“Miracle did not happen”: Aliyev rejected Pashinyan’s proposal

The past six years can be characterized in different ways for Armenia, but it is obvious that the period from 2018 to the present day is a series of catastrophic geopolitical failures that threaten national security today.

You don’t have to look far for examples. On September 9-10, we witnessed another failure. On September 9, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said that representatives of official Yerevan included the entire agreed text, articles, and snippets of articles in the tenth draft of a peace treaty with Azerbaijan. The Foreign Minister also stated that Yerevan and Baku have a real chance to sign the document in a short time, thereby repeating Nikol Pashinyan’s proposal to sign the document on the basis of 13 of the 16 articles of the treaty already agreed upon.
Baku reacted to Mirzoyan’s statements, stating that some provisions of the draft peace treaty with Armenia cannot be agreed upon since Yerevan, in the opinion of the Azerbaijani side, did not fulfill the necessary conditions.

“Although many provisions of the draft have already been agreed, that is, about 80%, some points have not yet been agreed. This does not mean that the agreement should be signed by excluding some provisions from the draft, as proposed by the Armenian side. This is unacceptable,” Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

The paradox of the situation is that despite Azerbaijan’s refusal announced on September 9, Nikol Pashinyan reiterated the same proposal at the diplomatic forum in Yerevan on September 10.

Baku, as expected, refused the option to sign a peace treaty based on 13 of the 16 articles of the treaty. Once again, we emphasize that this is another failure of Pashinyan’s policy since his yet another initiative was rejected by Ilham Aliyev.

Both in the fall of 2022 and in the winter of 2023, Pashinyan offered official Baku to sign a “framework agreement”. That is, to agree and adopt a set of principles on which relations between the two countries should be based. Baku not only refused this offer but also perpetrated ethnic cleansing in Artsakh in September 2023, and in the spring and summer of 2024, without a signed agreement on the principles of border delimitation, insisted on Armenia’s surrender of territories in the Tavush region.

Pashinyan’s latest failure proves that one of the main problems preventing Yerevan from having even the slightest visible success at the negotiating table is the format of these negotiations.

For many years, the Aliyevs, father and son, have sought both the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group and the transfer of the process to the bilateral negotiations without mediators. A mediator in the negotiation process is necessary both to monitor compliance with agreements and to balance the positions of the parties.

In our case, there is neither one nor the other, and the format of “negotiations without mediators” allows Baku to feel Turkey’s support behind its back, and Yerevan, through the efforts of Nikol Pashinyan, who “doctrinally” seeks to oust Russia from the region at any cost, remained at the negotiating table one-on-one with Ankara and Baku. In this case, we cannot talk about the balance in the process.

Pashinyan’s geopolitical failures have already cost us Artsakh. The very near future will show if they cost us the whole of Armenia.

Think about it…